Flesh of My Flesh is a collection of articles by today's most respected scientists, philosophers, bioethicists, theologians, and law professors about whether we should allow human cloning. It includes historical pieces to provide background for the current debate. Religious, philosophical, and legal points of view are all represented.

The purpose of this multi-study article was to investigate the roles of adaptability and social support in predicting a variety of psychological outcomes. Data were collected from Year 12 college students, university students, and non-studying members of the general public. Findings showed that, beyond variance attributable to social support, adaptability made a significant independent contribution to psychological wellbeing and psychological distress across all studies. Beyond the effects of adaptability, social support was found to make a significant independent contribution to most (...) wellbeing outcomes. In a multi-group analysis comparing predictors of psychological wellbeing in university students and non-studying adults, where the same outcome measures were used, it was found that adaptability played a stronger role for university students, whereas social support played a stronger role for non-studying adults. Finally, there was no evidence of an interaction between adaptability and social support predicting psychological outcomes—adaptability and social support operated as independent main effects. These findings demonstrate the importance of adaptability and social support in uniquely predicting psychological wellbeing in different sample groups. It is argued here that these two factors, should be given greater consideration in discussions of psychological wellbeing, and are relevant to psychological wellbeing at different major developmental life stages. (shrink)

A great deal of research has demonstrated that learning is influenced by the learner’s prior background knowledge (e.g. Murphy, 2002; Keil, 1990), but little is known about the processes by which prior knowledge is deployed. We explore the role of explanation in deploying prior knowledge by examining the joint effects of eliciting explanations and providing prior knowledge in a task where each should aid learning. Three hypotheses are considered: that explanation and prior knowledge have independent and additive effects on (...) learning, that their joint effects on learning are subadditive, and that their effects are superadditive. A category learning experiment finds evidence for a superadditive effect: explaining drives the discovery of regularities, while prior knowledge constrains which regularities learners discover. This is consistent with an account of explanation’s effects on learning proposed in Williams & Lombrozo (in press). (shrink)

Murphy, Elysia Government funds should not be used to endorse religion in state schools. The presence of chaplains and scripture teachers in public schools diminishes the secularity of the state school system. Given the plethora of faith-based schools for families seeking a religious education, it is not unreasonable for non-religious families to expect a secular education from the government sector.

Critical Theory is usually associated with an intellectual tradition which emerged from the work of a group of social philosophers who coalesced around the Institute for Social Research, established in Frankfurt in 1923. This tradition is now considered to have two major branches: the first related to the work of Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, Leo Lowenthal, and Walter Benjamin, while the second pertains to the expansion of this original work which has been proffered by Jürgen Habermas, (...) Claus Offe, Niklas Luhmann, Karl-Otto Apel, and others. It should be immediately noted that Critical Theory does not form a unity, for it does mean different things to both its early and current adherents. Without overstating the case, however, the common theme which unites these theorists is a dislike for the types of determinism which saw socialism arising automatically from either appropriate social conditions or at the behest of elite party members. In each case the belief was inadvertently advanced that people do not make their own history. In line with the work of Lukács and Korsch, these critical theorists wanted to develop a more vital Marxist theory, one which understands human praxis to be at the center of social development and, thus, human liberation. (shrink)

Contents: John BURNHEIM: Introduction. Mihály VAJDA: A Lover of Philosophy - A Lover of Europe. Phillippe DESPOIX: On the Possibility of a Philosophy of Values. A Dialogue within the Budapest School. Martin JAY: Women in Dark Times: Agnes Heller and Hannah Arendt. Johann P. ARNASON: The Human Condition and the Modern Predicament. Richard J. BERNSTEIN: Agnes Heller: Philosophy, Rational Utopia and Praxis. Zygmunt BAUMAN: Narrating Modernity. Peter BEILHARZ: Theories of History - Agnes Heller and R.G. Collingwood. Richard WOLIN: Heller's Theory (...) of Everyday Life. Paul HARRISON: Radical Philosophy and the Theory of Modernity. Arthur J. JACOBSON: The Limits of Formal Justice. Peter MURPHY: Civility and Radicalism. Peter MURPHY: Pluralism and Politics. Victoria CAMPS: The Good Life: A Moral Gesture. Laura BOELLA: Philosophy Beyond and the Baseless and Tragic Character of Action. György MÁRKUS: The Politics of Morals. Agnes HELLER: A Reply to My Critics. The Bibliography of Agnes Heller. (shrink)

Accession Number: ATLA0001788504; Hosting Book Page Citation: p 265-277.; Physical Description: diag ; Language(s): English; Issued by ATLA: 20130825; Publication Type: Essay.

Emotion Review, Volume 14, Issue 3, Page 167-181, July 2022. A growing cadre of influential scholars has converged on a circumscribed definition of empathy as restricted only to feeling the same emotion that one perceives another is feeling. We argue that this restrictive isomorphic matching definition is deeply problematic because it deviates dramatically from traditional conceptualizations of empathy and unmoors the construct from generations of scientific research and clinical practice; insistence on an isomorphic form undercuts much of the functional value (...) of empathy from multiple perspectives of analysis; and combining the opposing concepts of isomorphic matching and self-other awareness implicitly requires motivational content, causing the RIM definition to implicitly require the kind of non-matching emotional content that it explicitly seeks to exclude. (shrink)

If logic binds all reality, it would appear that God must be bound by logic. Swinburne argues that logic binds only actual human sentences. His case rests on an argument against Platonism, and the assertion that contradictions are incoherent. I argue that logic binds any possible language and so places a significant limit on God’s actions, that one need not be a Platonist to hold this, and that contradictions are not incoherent. I conclude that if God is an agent, his (...) hands must be tied, and explain why I find this conclusion unwelcome. (shrink)

We often impute responsibility to others for the purpose of retributive punishment - sometimes hoping that they receive the level of suffering proportional to what Kant calls their "inner wickedness". But do we know enough to do this without reckless error? Are we morally pure enough to do this without hypocrisy? The present essay explores these two questions. Oftmals rechnen wir anderen Verantwortlichkeit zu, um durch Strafe Vergeltung zu üben - und dies manchmal in der Hoffnung, daß ihnen gerade der (...) Grad an Leid zugefügt wird, der im rechten Verhältnis zu dem steht, was Kant "innere Bösartigkeit" nennt. Aber wissen wir eigentlich genug, um dies ohne grobe Fahrlässigkeit, und sind wir moralisch rein genug, um dies ohne Heuchelei tun zu können? Der vorliegende Beitrag befaßt sich mit diesen beiden Fragen. (shrink)

With _Trilogy of Resistance_, the political philosopher Antonio Negri extends his intervention in contemporary politics and culture into a new medium: drama. The three plays collected for the first time in this volume dramatize the central concepts of the innovative and influential thought he has articulated in his best-selling books _Empire_ and _Multitude_, coauthored with Michael Hardt. In the tradition of Bertolt Brecht and Heiner Müller, Negri’s political dramas are designed to provoke debate around the fundamental questions they raise about (...) resistance, violence, and tyranny. In _Swarm_, the protagonist searches for an effective mode of activism; with the help of a Greek-style chorus, she tries on different roles, from the suicide bomber and party apparatchik to the multitude. _The Bent Man_, set in fascist Italy, focuses on a woodcutter who resists fascism by bending himself in two and using his own now-twisted body as a weapon against war. In _Cithaeron_, perhaps the most audacious of the three plays, Negri reworks Euripides’s _Bacchae_ to explore the circumstances that would compel a diverse and creative community to withdraw from both the despotic government that constrains it and the traditional family relationships that reinforce that despotism. First published in France in 2009 and featuring an introduction by Negri, _Trilogy of Resistance_ provides a direct and passionate distillation of Negri’s concepts and offers insights into one of the most important projects in political philosophy currently under way, as well as a timely reminder of the power of theater to effectively dramatize complex and challenging ideas. (shrink)

While discussions of the imagination have been limited in philosophy of science, this is beginning to change. In recent years, a vast literature on imagination in science has emerged. This paper surveys the current field, including the changing attitudes towards the scientific imagination, the fiction view of models, how the imagination can lead to knowledge and understanding, and the value of different types of imagination. It ends with a discussion of the gaps in the current literature, indicating avenues for future (...) research. (shrink)

This article utilizes a political system framework to trace the political sources of business risk stemming from the unfolding HIV/AIDS generalized epidemic in South Africa. The article integrates relevant dimensions of the fields of international business and political science to facilitate the assessment of such risks for firms. Risk formation and updating is a sequential process. The conditions from which business risk emerges, the politicization of the generalized (i.e., widespread) epidemic through boundary-crossing activities, and “inputs” are explored. The transformation of (...) HIV/AIDS from an epidemic to a business threat is underscored by the South African government’s tendency to view the issue as part of the public agenda rather than part of its formal agenda. Governmental inaction, as well as action, led to an array of risks for firms operating in South Africa (e.g., operations, asset impairment, competitive, franchise). Mitigating strategies for managers are discussed, including avoidance, offsetting, transference, sharing, remedy, and anticipation. (shrink)

Thomas Friedman’s best-selling The World is Flat has exerted much influence in the west by providing both an accessible analysis of globalisation and its economic and social effects, and a powerful cultural metaphor for globalisation. In this review, we more closely examine Friedman’s notion of the social contract, the moral centre of his hopeful vision of a globalised world. While Friedman’s social contract holds a more generous view of social and state obligation than his neoliberal economic analysis might otherwise allow, (...) his fallacious assumptions about education rest on poorly argued claims about the nature of human beings, the proper aims of schooling, and meanings of justice in a globalised world. (shrink)

Universities and Innovation Economies examines the rise and fall of the mass university and post-industrial society, considering how we might revitalize economic and intellectual creativity. Looking to a much more inventive social and economic paradigm to drive long-term growth, the author argues for a smaller, leaner, more effective university model - one capable of delivering a greater degree of high-level discovery and creative power.

It is widely accepted that virtuous behaviour ought to be motivated in the right way, done for the right reasons, and an appropriate response to the values manifested in a situation. In this article I describe how cases of individuals having poor understanding of the reasons for their behaviour, can nevertheless be conducive to the development of virtue. One way in which giving reasons for one's own behaviour can be inaccurate is when the reasons given are confabulatory. In confabulation, the (...) reasons given for behaviour are post hoc, do not capture factors which actually brought the behaviour in question about, and are not well supported by evidence. Confabulations protect an individual's positive self-representations at the expense of more accurate appraisals of themselves and the circumstances. However, I argue that engaging in the construction of a positive self-narrative can be efficacious in making it a reality. Importantly, this is only possible when agents have the know-how of certain self-relational skills and attitudes, which are captured in a meta-virtue of self-regulation. When individuals can regulate their values and their behaviour effectively, such that they are in keeping, they can ultimately consistently embody virtues. Confabulation can be, and probably often is, part of this process. (shrink)

Error‐free genome duplication and accurate cell division are critical for cell survival. In all three domains of life, bacteria, archaea, and eukaryotes, initiator proteins bind replication origins in an ATP‐dependent manner, play critical roles in replisome assembly, and coordinate cell‐cycle regulation. We discuss how the eukaryotic initiator, Origin recognition complex (ORC), coordinates different events during the cell cycle. We propose that ORC is the maestro driving the orchestra to coordinately perform the musical pieces of replication, chromatin organization, and repair.

Systems of Pain/Networks of Resilience is a transcript of a video, a chapter in an interdisciplinary research project. Artist Meghan Moe Beitiks interviewed people with personal or pro...

The period of British colonial rule in India is typically regarded as philosophically sterile. Indian philosophy written in English during the British colonial period is often ignored in histories of Indian philosophy, or, when considered explicitly, dismissed either as uncreative or as inauthentic. The late Daya Krishna thought hard about this at the end of his life, and we have been thinking about this in conversation with him. We show that this dismissal is unjustified and that this is a fertile (...) period for Indian philosophy in which traditional Indian philosophical ideas were brought into dialogue with the West and advanced with great acumen. In this paper, we present one case study to illustrate this point. (shrink)

Aesthetic Capitalism offers an innovative analysis of contemporary capitalism and its use of image, symbolism, creativity and other aesthetic elements to produce economic value.

The Concordance is designed around units of philosophical sense whose limits in the text are indicated to the line. Unlike research tools based merely on the occurrence of key words (e.g., cause), it provides precise and complete information about not only the location but also the diversity of content in all the items covered by its survey. Furthermore it provides the capability for tracing the family of topics to which a particular text may belong. In short, the Concordance tells you (...) as much as possible about a text before you look it up. (shrink)

These essays take up contemporary debates concerning the rationality of legal and political institutions. Roberto Unger proposes a "politics of modernism"--a politics appropriate to the historical experience that Nietzsche calls "nihilism" and identifies as the re-grounding of all values in human will. Unger's aim is to heighten the artificiality, plasticity or revisability of all social arrangements, so that the self may perpetually overcome its context. But such an attempt to give the idea of self-overcoming a political translation threatens to be (...) devoid of any content beyond the reiterated assertion of the will. Wittgenstein's remarks on rule-following give voice to an anxiety that recurs in contemporary legal culture: Can a rule--in words that H. L. A. Hart once used--"step forward to claim its own instances"? Wittgenstein does not deny that it can, but he wishes to call attention to our captivation by a picture of a "rule by itself," according to which this "stepping forward" seems queer in light of an otherwise unbridgeable gap between a rule and its application. In the grip of such a picture, it becomes tempting to think that the normative demand of a rule must be activated by an interpretation. Such a thought leads not only to philosophical perplexity, but to failures of justification in the court-room. To make sense of Aristotle's notion of corrective justice, we need the idea that a judgment can be genuinely in accord with a universal even though the content of the universal cannot be completely spelled out in detachment from the concrete situations to which it is applied. It is plausible to see much of contemporary tort law as a specification of corrective justice. But attempts to supply corrective justice with a consequentialist foundation are unable to account for the significance of wrongful agency in tort law, while attempts to supply it with a deontological foundation are unable to account for the significance of the tort victim's loss. (shrink)

My objective in this article is to question whether the problem of free will can, within our current conceptual system, be framed coherently. It is already widely recognized that a mental faculty, the will, needed to initiate action, no longer fits with current thought. However, we can still ask whether human decisions and actions are determined by something other than the agent. So the important question is whether we still have a cogent concept of determinism. The two prevalent alternatives are (...) a closed set of deterministic laws of nature, and a simple distillation of the principle of sufficient reason: all events must have a cause. I first provide examples showing that philosophical concepts come and go as categorial frameworks change. The modern concept of deterministic laws of nature was developed during the latter half of the modern period and is now being called seriously into question. G. W. Leibniz’s principle of sufficient reason could only be justified in theological terms, which most contemporary Western scholars reject. I end with an inadequate account of a dawning worldview based on complex adaptive systems theory, in which most human actions are best described in terms of non-necessitating propensities. (shrink)

By turns beautiful, poignant, frightening, and funny, Eyewitness is a personal pictorial record of life in Northern Ireland over nearly forty years. Murphy's photographs are accompanied by detailed and candid captions revealing the events, people, and atmosphere in the region. This book is distributed for O'Brien Press, Dublin and is for sale only in the United States, it's territories and dependencies, Canada, and the Philippines.

As contribution to a recent debate (James, 1998; Murphy etal., 1997, 1998) the proportion of twins following ovulation induction (OI) or assisted conception (AC) in 1994 in Oxfordshire and West Berkshire was estimated, and by extrapolation the natural twinning rate in England and Wales was judged to have maintained a plateau phase since the 1970s. Similar figures for 1995 and 1996 from the same study, and hence a more stable local estimate, are now provided. The proportions, as before, were (...) estimated from women's responses to a questionnaire within a case[hyphen]control study, with ascertainment from general practitioners' records or hospital case[hyphen]notes for non[hyphen]responders or for those excluded from the study originally. In 1994, 1995 and 1996 the proportion of twins following OI/AC was overall 27% (24%, 30% and 27% respectively). Restriction to the 87% locally resident made no difference. The national crude twinning rate for those years was overall 13·3 per 1000 maternities (12·8, 13·6 and 13·4 respectively). (shrink)

In a seventeenth-century English landscape populated with towering political and philosophical figures like Hobbes, Harrington, Cromwell, Milton, and Locke, William Penn remains in many ways a man apart. Yet despite being widely neglected by scholars, he was a sophisticated political thinker who contributed mightily to the theory and practice of religious liberty in the early modern Atlantic world. In this long-awaited intellectual biography of William Penn, Andrew R. Murphy presents a nuanced portrait of this remarkable entrepreneur, philosopher, Quaker, and (...) politician.Liberty, Conscience, and Toleration focuses on the major political episodes that attracted William Penn's sustained attention as a political thinker and actor: the controversy over the Second Conventicle Act, the Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis, the founding and settlement of Pennsylvania, and the contentious reign of James II. Through a careful examination of writings published in the midst of the religious and political conflicts of Restoration and Revolutionary England, Murphy contextualizes the development of Penn's thought in England and America, illuminating the mutual interconnections between Penn's political thought and his colonizing venture in America. An early advocate of representative institutions and religious freedom, William Penn remains a singular figure in the history of liberty of conscience. His political theorizing provides a window into the increasingly vocal, organized, and philosophically sophisticated tolerationist movement that gained strength over the second half of the seventeenth century. Not only did Penn attempt to articulate principles of religious liberty as a Quaker in England, but he actually governed an American polity and experienced firsthand the complex relationship between political theory and political practice. Murphy's insightful analysis shows Penn's ongoing significance to the broader study of Anglo-American political theory and practice, ultimately pointing scholars toward a new way of understanding the enterprise of political theory itself. (shrink)

America's supposed moral decline from an imagined golden age, and the threat of divine punishment for the sin of straying from the path of righteousness, have been consistent themes in its political and religious rhetoric. In Prodigal Nation, Andrew Murphy investigates the jeremiad's historical roots and probes the ways in which it continues to illuminate themes and tensions in American social and political life.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Air of Liberty:A Transatlantic PerspectiveKieran M. Murphy (bio)"En somme le rôle du critique serait sans cesse de faire de l'air dans le plein du monde mais non pas forcement de faire du vide."—Roland Barthes"Dèyè mòn, gen mòn" ["Behind mountains, there are mountains"]—Haitian proverbThe phrase "I can't breathe" has become a worldwide rallying cry against injustice. Ben Okri deems "I can't breathe" the "mantra of oppression" that should (...) "spark the real change our world so desperately needs." He attributes the phrase's remarkable impact to how it taps into our primal fear of suffocation, encouraging empathy for "seemingly insignificant people." He also brings attention to how, as a slogan, "I can't breathe" subverts institutional racism through poetic means: "Not even William Shakespeare, Walt Whitman, James Baldwin or Toni Morrison at their most eloquent came out with anything as simple in the genius of its truth as: 'I can't breathe.'" This truth is airborne: "'I can't breathe' suddenly equates racism with the deprivation of air, which is what it always was." The chokehold of racism emerged with the transatlantic slave trade and, Okri concludes, has been ever since the prohibition of breathing "freedom."The powerful convergence of poetics and politics in the slogan "I can't breathe" comes from its essential truth: the aerial nature of freedom. More than just a concept or metaphor, freedom is also something you breathe. Freedom is a kind of concept-image that depends on our intimate, life-sustaining relationship with the atmosphere. "I can't breathe" brings attention to this relationship to help redress the failure of our institutions to bestow freedom equally.The aerial nature of freedom is even more apparent in the related slogan "the air of liberty." References to "the air of liberty" occurred frequently during the French Revolution to convey the origin of the "human rights" that have become the bedrock of our democratic institutions. Today, these human rights continue to exert their legal weight for the defense of equality. Yet, when confronted with the evasive mechanism of institutional racism, they keep falling short. This predicament is partly due to [End Page 200] their supposed airtight foundation. "The air of liberty" offers a window to the turbulent time when human rights sprang conspicuously from the atmosphere, that we can reopen to shift the focus from the legal to the aerial origin of freedom. This strategy unleashes historical winds that swept across the Atlantic world, including a critical undercurrent from the Haitian Revolution that prefigured the "I can't breathe" movement and its critique of the white chokehold on freedom. Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 1.Detail of Jean-Jacques-François Le Barbier, Déclaration des droits de l'homme et du citoyen, circa 1789 (Source: Wikimedia Commons)The best-known depiction of the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (Fig. 1) portrays the origin of liberty in a scene unfolding in the sky. Spreading its light and dissipating the clouds of error, the Enlightenment's eye of reason levitates like an aerostat. Its liberating power illuminates the law symbolized by a winged figure pointing to the tablets below containing the articles proclaiming that "men" are born free and equal. Despite the prominence given to the eye of reason, it is in the atmosphere in which it elevates that we must look for the elemental spring of liberty.References to the aerial nature of liberty most intriguingly surfaced in contemporary debates concerning the universality of the Declaration of the Rights of Man. The revolutionary and abolitionist Jacques Pierre [End Page 201] Brissot characterized the 1791 slave rebellion that ravaged the colony of Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) as a fight for a purer, healthier air. In a speech delivered the same year at the National Assembly, he argued that, following the storming of the Bastille and the Declaration of the Rights of Man, the "atmosphere" of inequality hovering over the plantations of Saint-Domingue had become noxious not only for the enslaved but also for the troops that France might dispatch to restore order in the colony... (shrink)

World history suffers from a paucity of clearly articulated, convincing explanations. While the rise of postmodernism and challenges to Eurocentrism did lead to some important correctives, the pendulum has swung too far the other direction, with a corresponding danger of 'throwing the baby out with the bathwater'. We need careful, theoretically informed debates about ways of organizing world history. What constitutes a good historical explanation? What should guide historians to choose relevant facts? Which theoretical schools could be made useful, and (...) to what ends? These questions are especially relevant to the main topic of this book: the 'great divergence' between the west and the rest of the world, and how this historical rupture is to be explained. The book provides extensive critical analyses of some of the key claims in world history, analyzing their strengths as well as their major weaknesses--too often rooted in insufficient familiarity of historians with theories they discard. It also historicizes the field and the debates to partly account for what caused some theories to become more influential and others to fall into oblivion--despite the fact that the more influential frameworks are seriously flawed and some of the more marginalized ideas are more coherent and plausible. The book offers insights regarding the theoretical and political relevance of older debates about the transition to capitalism and historical materialism. Three major schools of thought in world history are critically examined through an in-depth theoretical and comparative analysis that has not been undertaken elsewhere: the so-called 'California School', World Systems Analysis, and Marxist theories of history, capitalism, and the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Murphy argues that, despite some of the more recent criticisms of older approaches to world history, the older theories remain indispensable for the writing of world history and for coming to terms with issues of global poverty, inequality and eco-catastrophe. (shrink)

The conflict between courts and medicine is best shown in the mental health cases requiring judgment of whether a person should be confined, and whether they should be medicated or left free to decide for themselves. In such cases, deprivation of liberty for noncriminal offenders is at question, but if they are released, they may be exposed to injury or injure others. “Clear and convincing” evidence is hard to prove in such cases.The TOPOFF 2 terrorism preparedness exercise was two years (...) in planning, but the courts were involved only seven days before the exercise. Judge Murphy was put in charge of the Circuit Court building and was asked to stop all court proceedings to stop people from going into a building that might have been contaminated. (shrink)